At the end of the eighteenth century, the Austrian Netherlands were plagued by political turmoil and social upheaval, brought forth by a reaction against the reformatory movement set up by the Habsburg government. The contestation of Joseph II’s reformist policy was performed in public, as the region was flooded with polemical pamphlets, ideological treatises and many other types of popular writings during (but also before and after) the period of the Brabant Revolution (1787-1789). Pamphlets have stood at the centre of attention for the historiography of Belgian political culture at the end of the ancien régime, yet this wide employment of the source material has not led to a comparative overview of the way these writings have been used in historical research. This article will attempt to fill this gap, by first providing a methodological typology of several historiographical uses of a particular pamphlet, the Manifeste du Peuple Brabançon, written at the end of 1789, and signed by the leader of the conservative opposition, Hendrik Van der Noot. Secondly, I will attempt to show how eighteenth-century pamphleteers used a multitude of discourses at their disposal, by briefly discussing another set of (pre-revolutionary) pamphlets. This has immediate consequences for the current understanding of eighteenth-century Brabant political culture, which, so I argue, should not be considered discursively monolithic (containing one political language) but pluralist (containing multiple political languages).